Sam spotted this insect on the side of the house on March 14, while we were out getting pictures “in the field” with the new camera[1]. It was about the size (about 1 mm wide and maybe 6 or 7 mm long) and shape of a grass seed stuck to the wall, which is probably what it was pretending to be. In fact, until I looked at it through the camera viewfinder (which gave quite a bit of magnification), I couldn’t quite be sure that it wasn’t a grass seed.
In early July, Sam and I were out fooling around with the insect nets. When we got back to the house, I was cleaning out the debris, and picked up a green oblong that was about the size and shape of an immature quackgrass seed. But then, it wiggled, and I realized it was actually a little green pupa. So, I put it in an insect cage to see what would emerge from it. I unfortunately dawdled too long over getting a photograph, and missed photographing the whole pupa. Here’s the skin, though:
And here’s what came out of it:
We caught this medium-sized orange dragonfly with an insect net in the unmowed part of the yard last summer. I put it into one of our collapsable insect cages for photographing, and it was mostly fairly willing to stay still and be photographed once it figured out that it couldn’t just fly off.
Thin green plant bug – Megaloceroea?
On July 20, Sam and I took a butterfly net off to try and catch a particularly large black butterfly that we’d been seeing alongside the road[1]. We didn’t find it, but when we got home, we found that we’d accidentally caught this bug in the net without realizing it:
We’ve had a tarantula for some time[1], and her primary food is crickets. In the summer, we mostly just catch crickets outside for her to eat, but in the winter that doesn’t work so well and we have to buy them. The only local place to buy crickets is quite a long drive away and has kind of unpredictably irregular business hours, so S_ has decided it will be more convenient to just raise them herself (on which there will probably be more later). So, to get a starting population, she mail-ordered 500 crickets[2]. When they arrived and she transferred them to their new home, she found that there was something else in the box too:
Previously on “What’s That Grub?”
Back in October, we found this larva in Sam’s dresser drawer:
At the time, I didn’t know what it was, although we guessed it was something predatory based on the way that it moved. It was pretty clear that identifying it would require raising it to adulthood, so I put it into a small plastic baby-food container, poked a couple of holes in the lid, and took a whirl at it.
S_ caught this huge beetle for me near the end of July, I don’t remember if she caught it in the house, or outdoors[1].
I’m pretty sure it’s a New House Borer, Arhopalus productus. Once you get beetles this large, there generally aren’t a lot of possiblities, and the two dimples on the pronotum behind the head are supposed to be pretty characteristic of the species. If she caught it indoors, that wouldn’t be too surprising, because they are commonly found in new houses[2] within the first year after construction. They are one of the few wood-borers whose larvae infest dry, dead wood. Like, for example, piled lumber in a lumberyard.
On January 10, I caught this tiny gnat when it landed on my computer screen while I was reading my email. I had to freeze it to get it to hold still while I took pictures
This isn’t the first time little gnats landed on my computer screen, they are constantly around the house at a low level and are drawn to lights. Such as a computer screen in an otherwise dimly-lit room.
Sam caught this one in the yard on July 30. She kept it in a box with some grass to eat for about a day, but ultimately decided that it would be better off if she let it go.
The distinguishing features on it are the black patch on the shoulders just above the front legs; the nearly clear forewings with irregular dark splotches on them; the dark bands running diagonally across the thighs on the hind legs; and the white lines on the top edges of the wings that meet about halfway down the back.
S_ found this rather attractively-colored beetle on our window on July 20, and it was large enough that I just took the pictures without a macro lens in the sunlight, with the beetle on my finger [1]
The combination of black and orange is warning coloration that we have seen before, indicating that this beetle probably is foul tasting and/or toxic.